Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday November 26, 2010 @04:05PM
from the obsoleting-your-dongles dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over the past few years, Apple has systematically upgraded the base level MacBook to a level where the difference between the Pro and consumer models were arguably becoming negligible. That's about to change. Apple will reportedly introduce a completely re-designed MacBook Pro this April that will borrow features from the recently released MacBook Air. The new Pros will reportedly come with an SSD and Light Peak technology, a transfer protocol capable of 10 Gbps both up and down. Light Peak, jointly developed by Intel and Apple, will reportedly be an Apple exclusive at first."

What pisses me off about this is that it's "Apple exclusive" at this point. Why the hell?

In doing so, they are pissing off many other vendors - HP, Lenovo/IBM, and Dell, to name a few, but certainly LSI would like the ability to license the technology.

I have been anxiously waiting for over a year for Intel to release this technology. It appears to be the one, great hope for a truly fast, inexpensive, and universal device interconnect.

Right now, we've got a handful of transport interconnects in the 8-12Gb/s range, all of which suck for one reason or another:

* 10Gb Ethernet - not such a bad option, as it can utilize older infrastructure fabric and can be used for networking topology, as well. Your storage can be easily transported over it using traditional network software.* Fiberchannel - Expensive and very single-purpose, but still a better option than* Infiniband - cheapest, but horrible support.* Firewire - hitting a bandwidth limitation and hasn't really improved much in a while.* USB 3.0 - bound by the host/guest model and host-oriented. Horribly CPU bound, still. Decent 'general purpose' when you don't need a decent inter-host transport.* SAS - holds too much legacy crap in it from SCSI. Relatively cost, but you're still (usually) requiring one or more of the other device interconnects for a storage system.

The fact that Apple is holding onto the reigns of a single bus design which could change

The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak. Internetworking? Fast server storage? SAN? Nada: none of their platforms are suited for it, and pretty much anything you could do with Apple platforms can already be done using existing buses. (If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)

Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.

Intel gets to work out the kinks on relatively uniform hardware configurations and Apple users are guaranteed to jump all over the first generation of something if it's marketed as "exclusive". It's win-win.

(If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)

WiFi, USB, FireWire, magsafe, unibody cases, Face Time, iPhone, glass trackpads, iPod, the batteries in the current MacBooks, Bonjour, AirPrint, multitouch... The list of things Apple directly invented, co-invented, or were early adopters of is extensive. The notion that Apple doesn't innovate is way out there. It's extremely difficult to think of a company that innovates more than Apple!

Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.

FireWire has been subject to demise? When exactly did this happen? It's not the dominant external bus, but it's very much alive and well. Apple had nothing to do with it's status of not being the dominant bus, the fact that it's so expensive is why (and that's also why it's such a great bus and is far from dead).

FireWire has been subject to demise? When exactly did this happen? It's not the dominant external bus, but it's very much alive and well. Apple had nothing to do with it's status of not being the dominant bus, the fact that it's so expensive is why (and that's also why it's such a great bus and is far from dead).

Apple has had a lot to do with the current state of Firewire. They've removed it from their iPods and dropping it on their lower-end machines. They are also part of the reason it's so expensive, by charging licensing fees that pushed people to USB2 as it was cheaper. Firewire is not dead, but it's pretty much turned into a niche market at this point.

Don't worry. Like USB in the 90s, this technology will eventually become standard on PCs thanks to Apple forcing device manufacturers to support it for the Mac. And, like before, PC users won't acknowledge yet another one of Apple's contributions to computing standards. Instead, like always, there will be more outdated one-button mouse jokes.

No, they shipped a computer that had no other low-speed interface ports on it for peripherals other than USB. You may remember it: the iMac.

This created a market for USB devices: mice, keyboard, scanners, printers, card readers etc that just was not taking off before that, since while some PC motherboards shipped with this "new fangled" USB port, it was poorly supported by Win95 (barely at all until late in the release cycle) and they still shipped (and continue to ship) with things like ps/2 ports, other din sockets, RS-232, 25 pin ports etc so people had no reason to specifically seek out USB devices on a bus that barely worked on Windows.

However, if you used an iMac, and many people did - it sold like hot cakes, and then soon after the iBook and other new Mac products you needed USB devices because it was the only peripheral port you had.

Also, I don;t recall Apple themselves actually claiming credit for anything - they just did what they did. I haven't seen any evidence they ever claimed they were taking credit for USB.

Also, if by "piggybacked on the efforts of Intel and the PC industry" you mean "adopted a standard that was designed to be used by hardware manufacturers to create a standard port and protocol for peripherals, ie DID EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR" then I suppose you are correct. Apple adopting USB early in the game could only have been a positive thing for Intel, who developed the thing. What do you think they wanted Apple to do? Not use it? When you Apple haters get going, you just throw logic right out of the window, don't you?

This created a market for USB devices: mice, keyboard, scanners, printers, card readers etc that just was not taking off before that, since while some PC motherboards shipped with this "new fangled" USB port, it was poorly supported

Exactly - this is what Apple is very, very good at, and why the industry needs them. They didn't invent the personal computer***, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, local area networking*, laptops** RISC-based PCs* USB, the small-form-factor computer, the floppy-free computer, the MP3 player, online music sales, the smartphone... What they did do is turn them into mainstream commercial successes and put a very large rocket up the conservative asses of the competition. Oh, you'd better add UN

My girlfriend (yes, really!;) ) was asking me this morning if I knew where she could buy an as-new MacBook from circa 2007. She wants a Mac but can't afford the latest model, whereas I quite happily pootle along on a £200 netbook. Seriously, Apple could make a killing by producing a really budget level MacBook rather than ever more expensive ones with...er....well I'm not entirely sure what they've introduced, but it's not as useful as, you know, a cheap portable Mac that people can afford to get t

Hm. I like apple products, and some here have accused me of being a fanatic. But looking at my history, it's more like this:

Year 1: buy $1100 laptop. Give old laptop to wife.
Year 2: remain happy with laptop.
Year 3: remain happy with laptop.
Year 4: remain happy with laptop.
Year 5: Wife spills coffee on her laptop. Give "new" laptop to wife, buy $1100 laptop.
All years: Consider phone, put it off for a year because work pays for crappy blackberry.
This past year: Consider iPad, put it off for the time being.

"all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware."

Not having to care is liberating.

I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it. Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has. You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles. You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles. Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.

I am a software developer. I use a macbook pro. It's great. I need something that works. I do not want to fuss with the OS, because I gain nothing from doing this and I honestly don't really care about it much. I want a powerful (i.e. *nix) CLI. I'd like to be able to play some music on it while I work. The mac does this and more better than any other computer I have used, regardless of OS. I can use it to accomplish work and not have to always figure out why it's acting weird now like I have had to do with every windows computer I have ever used since the dawn of time. I also don't have to spend time tweaking it out to make it behave like I have had to do with every linux desktop I have had for the last five or so years of using linux.

I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.

I dislike the Apple "cool factor" because it causes people to overlook the fact that Apple is making awesome computers with an OS waaaay superior to Windows because it has a *nix CLI under it and way better than linux distro X because it has the polish you'd expect from commercial software. Most people who dislike Apple, I find, have never actually gotten their hands on any of their products and dislike Apple based on principle. Apple has their flaws (iPhone 4 comes to mind + Jobs denial of said flaws), but let's not pretend that some dell laptop running windows 7 is even on the same level as a macbook pro.

I'll agree with you - most of my development these days is web development and iPhone / iPad development, but I still dabble back into industrial automation from time to time. I like my Mac Mini, for instance - it's solid, it's managed to survive three major OS upgrades since 2006, and it's still solid after four years of constant use. I like the "it just works" philosophy - I can focus on software development, not hardware troubleshooting. Apple isn't perfect, but the OS and Hardware combination is pretty damned good. (I will say, though, that after four years I'm finally going to upgrade the little box. This one will sit on the shelf and be a media box.)

The 'cool factor' is problematic - you're dead on right about that. But I've not been one to care too much about what everyone else thinks is cool anway;-)

Well said. Similar situation for me. I used Linux for years, and eventually just got tired of fixing shit. The first time fixing every single problem is a challenge, and as a student I enjoyed picking the system apart and troubleshooting. It was a good experience. But when the wireless breaks again and again. When the video is crappy again and again, eventually it wears you down.

Up until last year I didn't own any mac products and didn't see a need to. Now I have an iMac at home and my faster Windows machine gets turned on maybe once a month. I have a Windows desktop machine at work, but use the Macbook whenever I can. Now I have an iPhone 4 for work, and it is fantastic. The thought that went into every detail is quite extraordinary. We tested the latest Android phones, and while they do most of the same things, they aren't anywhere close to the iPhone. I see it the same as for MP3 players and the iPod. When the iPod was released all the other mp3 players were arguably better from a features perspective. And yet the iPod dominated very quickly. Ease of use and thoughtful design beats raw features every time.

Yes, heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!

"Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to."

Well thats the 'new car buyers' attitude all right, and you are paying a premium for that "luxury". Most people in the world however, drive cars with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on them and like to know what tire pressure is or what an alternator does. You don't have to be an electrical engineer to fix a car, and you dont have to be a hardware engineer to troubleshoot a computer. You make it seem like its so dificult and so much fuss to learn these things. If you cant do it on your own, take a course. Just like driving, or basic car repair for women that a co worker took recently - there are courses out there which will make you feel better about yourself. *Fun fact that I didnt even know that she learned in that course, if you turn the air conditioning on in the winter for a minute or so, it will suck all the moisture off of your windows and defog them much better than the fans do. Thats the kind of thing that really makes peoples lives a bit easier. Thats the kind of thing that a little knowledge brings.

Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about. This is why people hated them in the 90s, this is why people hate them today. You evidently want to buy into a world where you don't know how anything works and always have to rely on others to fix your problems for you. Sure its "liberating", but so is "finding god". What you call liberation, I call enslavement. Perception is everything I guess.

"Yes, Heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!"

I hate to break this to every obnoxiously arrogant jackass on this site that thinks because they know how to fix their car or their radio or whatever else that they are somehow some elevated and enlightened individual that can look down their noses at others but here's a fucking news flash: there are tons of interesting and important subjects, disciplines and things that most people—even intelligent and well educated people—don't give two shits about and never want to have to deal with. Not ever.

For instance, I'll bet there are plenty of trauma surgeons out there that didn't know your fun fact. I bet people who have won Nobel prizes didn't know that. I bet if they found out they wouldn't be even slightly inclined to take a course on fucking auto repair.

I use a Mac and the computer isn't any more dumbed down than Windows or even some variants of Linux (which is what I used three years prior to switching to a Mac). It's certainly easier to use and more trouble free. However, it doesn't limit me in any way I care about. (Besides, it's like saying a manual transmission is "dumbed down" rather than "easier to use with less control, but since I use my car for commuting and not for racing the ease of use is more important than the performance.")

Mac discussions always bring out the most retarded this site has to offer (except for maybe global warming and/or anything about Republicans).

"Sure its 'liberating', but so is 'finding god'. What you call liberation, I call enslavement."

Seriously? This is what I'm talking about. Somehow someone being pleased with the ease of use of a computer has become akin to "enslavement." It was also, apparently, a fine opportunity to tie in your own religious spite at the same time, which of course is totally necessary in a discussion about a rumor about Apple incorporating a new I/O bus. That always makes me wax religious.

Some people want their stuff to just work. It doesn't make them stupid or ignorant or inferior or less enlightened. It doesn't even mean their somehow universally opposed to learning. I mean, come the fuck on, people have their disciplines and their interests. You sound like you'd be some asshole who'd get on a guy's case because he always ate out because he didn't care about learning to cook. There's nothing wrong with that. Do you get one people's cases for seeing doctors because they aren't experts on health? Do you hate power tools because people should learn how to properly use hand tools?

What the fuck is wrong with you people? Easier to use != dumbed down. Dumbed down != bad.

What a fucking joke. Having a nation of amateur auto-mechanics accomplishes nothing for society. Specialization has always been the vanguard of civilization. 10,000 odd years ago some enterprising folks learned all about how to grow edible plants as a reliable food source, and then idiots like you probably laughed at them because they were too busy creating civilization as we know it to hunt for themselves. The fact that I can pay some bloke to fix my car me

Pat yourself on the back for catching me forgetting to delete some text from my post before hitting submit. I typed both and googled which is under OSX so I could delete the incorrect one. Why did I have to google it? Why do I not just know that? Because practically speaking THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO ARE MINUSCULE. So you gotta rmdir instead of rm -rF. BFD.

Not having to care is different from not being able to care.Price a high end MBP with anything of the same specs from Dell and look at the price difference. If you get the same resolution, same CPU, ram, bus speed, HD, battery runtime, your looking at maybe a $100-$200 price difference, and the MBP comes in an aluminum case, higher MTBF, no exposed fan ports.

Purchasing higher quality hardware for a marginally higher price does not, in itself, indicate ignorance. Sometimes it indicates the belief that the va

You know what's cool? Having spent enough time caring about computers, hardware and software to get a job that pays well enough that I really don't need to give a shit about buying some cheap ass Dell or HP laptop instead of a MacBook.

Barring that I know precisely what hardware is in my MacBook Pro. I know that Apple hardware is more expensive. I also know that my time is even more precious and expensive. So, having a computer that pretty much never fails and requires basically no tinkering is awesome. I'm at a point in my life where things like processor MHz mean far less to me than say a trackpad (something I use ALL THE TIME) that is very functional or extended battery life. These kinds of details are where Apple reigns supreme.

My MacBook still has a Core 2 Duo and on forums full of the nitwits who measure their penis by their i7, there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. In fact, they tell me they could get a Dell with an i7 for $300 or something. Whatever. I don't care. That laptop would be a plastic piece of shit with a terrible track pad that's twice as thick with half the battery life of the machine I'm running.

This computer is a tool that meets my need and does it better and more enjoyably than any other machines I've used. I fucking hate Windows (7 included) and Linux was always more work than I wanted to put into it (and ran it exclusively for 3 years before switching to a Mac).

(Incidentally, I don't know shit about cars. However, since I'm not a moron finding an honest mechanic in a day and age where shopping around and internet reviews are easy to come by is not exactly rocket science.)

People buy Macs because they think they are worth the money, not because they aren't aware that you can buy other computers cheaper. Kinda like the same reason that people buy nice cars or any other product on the planet.

I think lightpeak is both much faster and much more versatile, and aims to replace usb, firewire, dvi, hdmi, even ethernet. this may be a good thing, because my experience with USB ( and , no yet) has been quite bad, from compatibility issues, to slow transfers, to high cpu usage. I lamented the fact that firewire was not cheaper and more widespread... maybe i'll get my wish with lighpeak.

I assume he refers to the unfortunate mixture of optimism, on the part of peripheral manufacturers, and strict adherence, on the part of some computer makes and models, to the USB spec's sections on power delivery. USB2 is quite clear about 5VDC, 500ma; but devices that work poorly, partially, or not at all without at least a few hundred ma more are downright ubiquitous. How exactly a fiber optic interface is going to solve that particular market problem is utterly beyond me; but it is a pain in the ass in

It'll be a cold day in hell before anything replaces ethernet. Do you have any idea what the install base on that stuff is? and the fact that(aside from autonegotiation issues on some chipsets) you can get anything from 10mbit crap with external AUI dongles to contemporary 1Gb gear happily chatting away on even a fairly cheap switch?

The consumer market is, increasingly, wireless for anything that isn't within a few meters of the ugly-stack-o-network-gear that inevitably collects next to the DSL or cable

Imagine a dock or port bar on your desk, you bring your laptop in plug in a single connector (although you may need power too, depends how Apple implement it) and everything on your deks now works, screen, keyboard, mouse, printer, ethernet... everything.

Thats something a LOT of laptop users have wanted for a very long time, and this is the potential in a standardized cable format not some propriety thing with 200 seperate wires so the slightest bend of the cable and you lose your display and have to buy a new dock/portbar

Will lightpeak be able to power my external hard drive? Will it charge my HD video camera while I pull video off it? Is it easily adaptable to HDMI? My new TV doesn't have a lightpeak port, and I'm not interested in buying another tv to get one.

I can hdmi cables for under $10. How long before lightpeak cables are that cheap?

DisplayPort is fine and all, but the adaptor to connect my macbook to my tv cost a small fortune, and it uses the headphone jack for optical audio, the displayport for video, and the usb port to power the adapter that converts it all to hdmi. A good PC laptop comes with an HDMI port... which just works with external equipment.

But every generation of your laptop doesn't need a whole new video connection. PCs are going from VGA to HDMI. That makes sense. Macs... started with some apple proprietary garbage, to mini dvi, to mini displayport, and now on to light peak... 4 separate connectors in the same period of time, while managing to bypass anything that anyone actually uses for anything else.

But every generation of your laptop doesn't need a whole new video connection. PCs are going from VGA to HDMI. That makes sense. Macs... started with some apple proprietary garbage, to mini dvi, to mini displayport, and now on to light peak... 4 separate connectors in the same period of time, while managing to bypass anything that anyone actually uses for anything else.

Umm, Apple have used VGA and then DVI and then Mini DisplayPort for video interfaces in the past 10 years. They had mini versions of these connectors, for which you were also given the necessary dongle to upsize it to the standard version of the interface.

There was also the short-lived ADC which was a superset of DVI and all machines that had an ADC connector on them also had a standard VGA or DVI port on them too.

On the PC front, you also seem to have forgotten DVI, which I'd warrant is a lot more common t

So Apple is finally catching up with SSDs in laptops. Light Peak is still in its infancy and useless as there are no devices to connect to it yet. Why pay more for something that should be standard now, and something that it's going to be useful until he laptop is well past its prime?

If laptops have the ports people will develop devices for it. That Macs are -known- to be coming with them then it's highly likely that peripheral manufacturers are creating devices that use it to be ready for the release.

The same could almost be said for USB 3. What's the point of USB 3 when there's eSATA? USB 3 is too slow for connecting a monitor, we already have ethernet ports... You either move forward or you'll get stuck with parallel ports, serial ports, SCSI, etc.

It's also a chicken-egg problem, device manufacturers won't make anything compatible with LightPeak until there is at least some computers with it.

huh? I use USB 2.0 DVI adapters all the time so I can have three monitors on my laptop, I can even string six or more of them together and you think USB 3.0 somehow couldn't handle that? As someone that already has USB 3.0 in my machine and external hard drives with USB 3.0 support I can say that the same is not true for USB 3.0. eSata has it's own problems and you're relying on your motherboard to time it correctly, nine times out of ten when I reboot a computer with a Drobo hooked to it, it will fail to p

Finally catching up? They were the first to offer SSD as a standard drive. As far as I know, they are still the only manufacturer to do so. The others still offer it as an upgrade, but not baseline as Apple has started to do. You'll also be hard pressed to find manufacturer's offering 512 GB SSD drives from the factory, also as Apple is already doing.

As to the 'why', Light Peak to USB adapters will most likely be an easy win for manufacturer's who aren't yet ready to make the jump to Light Peak, meaning it

It's hard to see why "taking away the choice between a traditional hard drive and SSD" would be innovation. Why would it be innovation that something is baseline rather than only fitted on certain models?

It's hard to see why "taking away the choice between a traditional hard drive and SSD" would be innovation. Why would it be innovation that something is baseline rather than only fitted on certain models?

I wouldn't call it innovation either, but a design choice. It does give better speed, albeit typically lower capacities. They might even go proprietary on the SSD and not use the standard form factor for an SSD drive or include it on the mainboard, allowing them to gain real estate within the chassis. Imho, that would be a mistake, but then again how many MacBook owners actually upgrade components instead of buying a who new unit?

Well who knows how it will work in Apple land. They are known for forcing changes because they think they are cool, whether it is time or not. For other manufacturers, Light Peak is just going to be another port at first. It isn't going to replace anything. Capabilities aside, you need to wait as peripherals get support. The first things I expect to see are external HDDs, and things like pro audio/video capture equipment. Video is going to be some time. No monitor today supports Light Peak (and relatively few even support DP) so it'll be some time. If it is to gain any traction, it'll have to have an interface to work with the high end discrete cards.

Even then it may need to develop a generation or so before it is useful 10gbps is not fast when you talk video. It is acceptable, but not fast. DP has 17gbits of bandwidth with its current standard, HDMI has 10gbits. So it is around as fast as current video standards, but offers no real speed advantage, which is really what it would take to force a change at this point. HDMI is heavily entrenched because it is what home theater gear uses. The reason to move to somethign else would be higher resolution, colour depth, and frame rate displays will need more. Say we want 2560x1600@30bpp@120Hz. That would need about 15gbits so DP could barely handle it, but nothing else. Now suppose we go with a 4k display, and 96bpp (32-bit floating point per colour to allow for HDR) again at 120Hz. Now we need 108gbps. So if a connector can offer much higher bandwidths, there'll be interest as we eventually want that for video, but at 10gbps Light Peak offers nothign the current ones don't. If Intel let's nVidia and AMD support it they probably will, but otherwise people will give it a miss.

For networking, no fucking way. Networking is stuck on Ethernet because networking uses Ethernet. It sounds like a tautology and that is really how it works. All local area nets are Ethernet. As such you have to support Ethernet to use them. As such all devices ship with Ethernet, as such all future stuff has to support it and so on. Nobody is going to redo their network to Light Peak. This is particularly true because 10gbE is already here, and really with networks even 1gig is really fast. Your network is local disk speed at that point. So you aren't going to convince people to dump their existing infrastructure for it.

In the long run Light Peak may become a popular somewhat universal computer interconnect but it is not happening any time soon. If Apple thinks they can force it they are wrong (for that matter they didn't force USB adoption, Mac users had to deal with it and then the industry moved that way at its own pace). However networking it will probably never replace, just because of the massive installed base of Ethernet.

No, it just means they're the first to roll it out. I expect it'll start appearing on expansion cards and other motherboards not long after. But Apple will get to tout having the first systems with the interface.

Yeah, and as long as they are the only one rolling out the Lightpeak because they are the only one allowed, there will be almost no devices made to plug into the interface... an interface without anything to plug in isn't much to brag about.

Just like no one ever made devices that plugged into the far more proprietary Apple Dock port? Come now, it's an Intel backed technology that appears first in MacBook Pros and is guaranteed to appear shortly afterward across the PC market.

I am not saying they won't appear.I am saying that most won't appear until Apples exclusive right is over.Having "exclusive right" off an interface is only stupid - you want an interface to be as widespread as possible so as many uses it as possible to get as many devices to use it as possibly.Exclusive is the opposite of that.

So say Light Peak comes to Macs first. The few peripherals that are made for this 10% of the market, how much are they going to cost? Well, you can only sell to a few people and those people already showed a propensity to buy expensive computers. On top of this, the costs of an optical interface are high.

So what do you think the companies will charge? They'll charge 3x what they do for anything else, just like with every other Mac-specific interface.

Lightpeak "will reportedly be an Apple exclusive at first."Sounds like a very good idea - making an interface exclusive for a manufacture which makes less than 10% of the computers. That will off course make the third party appliance makers go wild and support this interface instead of USB3 which can be used with the other 90% of the computers... really a great idea.It will sure be funny for the Apple users to brag about their new Lightpeak connections when they have almost nothing to plug into them and all

Which is a bad way to spread an new interface.You want an interface to become widespread and used by everyone - making it exclusive for Apple is counter productive even if it is only for a limited time.

Remember the USB launch? USB didn't took off until PCs and Windows supported it - there was quite few USB devices made before when Apple was the only one delivering USB equipped computers and then it almost exploded when Windows 98 was launched with USB support. Now I am sure some Mac zealot is going to dig u

Unless I remember this wrong. Apple was the LAST manufacturer to include USB. They were using firewire only for a LONG LONG time. The reason USB support took so long to come about is because Windows 95 and 98 SUCKED in the driver department

Sounds like a very good idea - making an interface exclusive for a manufacture which makes less than 10% of the computers. That will off course make the third party appliance makers go wild and support this interface instead of USB3 which can be used with the other 90% of the computers... really a great idea.

You're absolutely correct. Like when Apple stupidly introduced the iMac back in 1998 with no floppy drive and those bizarre little USB ports. Not to mention the colors and attention to design, which flew in the face of the beige-box standard. Considering that Macintosh only had market share of around 3%, peripheral manufacturers refused to waste time and resources supporting USB, and consumers ignored the iMac because floppy drives to this day remain a must-have for personal computers. The iMac failed dramatically as predicted by tech pundits, and it will be remembered as just another inane idea by Steve Jobs. So typical of Apple, to arrogantly believe that they can influence the tech industry with their pie-in-the-sky toys.

They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference. USB peripherals started launching almost right away because it was a good bus and Intel mandated it on all new motherboards. However support for older standards remained for a long time. USB keyboards and mice were the exception, not the rule, even after it had been around for awhile. Printers took a long time to stop ha

They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference.

To say that Apple's move to USB made little or no difference is simply not true. The original iMac did in fact influence multiple industries in terms of industrial design, and in the tech industry by popularizing the new technology in the minds of consumers. Intel mandated it on all new motherboards, but they did not pr

They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference. USB peripherals started launching almost right away because it was a good bus and Intel mandated it on all new motherboards.

LightPeak is reportedly nearly as fast as the LightPeek protocol which is currently use for transmitting "peeks" of cleavage in close proximity. Common applications include viewing plumber butt-crack and looking at the waitress's cleavage as she leans over the wipe the table.

The podcast is pure (and false) speculation -- it doesn't cite sources, and it's providing supposedly very definite details about something that won't show up for half a year.
Having talked to Apple workers and knowing a bit of what goes on in the inside, even *Apple* doesn't know what the system will necessarily be like that far out. It has cancelled systems at the last minute or made part swaps weeks before launch because they either didn't work properly, cost too much or even for political reasons. Ap

From the article:
"We’re not sure how we feel about removing the optical drive from the Pro machine, but that’s a debate for another time."
I welcome it.
I've never used the drive in my MacBook Pro.
I used the drive in my old MacBook Pro once, and that was to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Shipping Lion on a USB stick would be awesome.
A few people would whinge if they dropped the DVD drive but I guess if they had 2 models, one with and one without, they'd end up killing the one with the DVD driv

I've used the drive in mine. Not frequently, but almost every time I did use it was not a time when I would have had an external drive easily accessible (e.g. travel) - not that I even have an external drive at all, now that I think about it. If I'm not going to use it frequently, I'm not going to bother bringing it with me if I travel - and then I'm stuck without it if I unexpectedly need it, which is what's happened to me in the past (didn't expect to need it - but finding blank discs is much easier than

Good riddance to optical drives. Outside of spending a few minutes trying to get a Playstation emulator working, I haven't used one in at least a year - including an OS reinstall; I haven't used optical media on a regular basis since probably 2005. For the longest time I've been hoping someone will make an adapter which will allow me to swap my DVD drive for an additional battery, something that I haven't seen as an option since using a Thinkpad Ultrabay [thinkwiki.org] probably fifteen years ago. If Apple finally does thi

Some of us watch DVDs using these optical drives you know...It is especially nice if you is on a business trip and want to see a movie - you only need to go down to the gas station and rent it and it will fit right into your laptop. So until we have another way of renting movies (and preferable not over Internet since that would be slow when you connect from hotels or with a 3g modem) I would like to keep the DVD drive.

Exception and not the rule? I suspect it would be easier for most people who carry a notebook daily to do without the extra size and weight, and then grab an external drive from your suitcase on those rare occasions when you actually want rent a movie from a gas station...;)

Some tech sites, blogs and fanboy pages have been posting claims/rumours of Apple involvement, but with Intel not acknowledging this, and even promoting Sony and others as partners, it doesn't seem very likely.

Wikipedia says: "Apple brought the concept of Light Peak, an interoperable standard which could handle large amounts of data and replace the multitudinous connector types with a single universal connector, to Intel in 2007 with the intention of Intel producing and developing the technology."

However, I know that Slashdot is packed to the bring with suspiciously anonymous Apple-bashers these days and that they won't believe anything positive about Apple whatsoever. The only good company is Google.

What advantage does it have? It'll load your program / files off your hard drive significantly faster and boot faster (the best SATA is only 6 Gbps). I don't know about you, but I can definitely see people being happier that their system / files load 66.667% faster.